Oh yea, and I'm getting about 8mpg

 

A loose injector or glowplug could cause a misfire because they both are used to seal the combustion chamber. I can't believe none of us have mentioned this yet but did you test the FICM yet, there is a "sticky" at the top of the Ford section on how to do this, being an 03 you are most likely going to have the 7 screw FICm. My truck would smoke out the neighborhood on start up and it didn't matter how warm it was outside, would have a misfire until warm and then after a couple months turned into a dead miss all the time, pulled all the injectors on drivers side and found #6 injector had a nut come off the mag cups that fire the injector, I was able to clean it up, put locktite on it, new orings on the 4 injectors, and also did the upgraded fuel spring sinse it was in the garage and now it fire right up, no smoke and starts stronge than it has in a long time.

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Forgot to add this, you can unplug the ICP to see if it bad, just unplug it and start it up to see if it makes a change, it goes into a safe mode to make sure motor has enough fuel to get you home, see what happens.

 

Your buddy's "buddy" who is a ford diesel tech, doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about either. I've all but lost faith in anyone with the "ford certification" when it comes to diesels. They don't seem to know squat, for the most part.

When I say it needs to be put on a scanner, I mean a real scanner, not a code reader. We need to monitor some things. Do you have access to something like this? There is something really wrong, and I'm 99% sure it's not a "bad" piston.

Follow Bob's advice. I'd have a cylinder contribution test run.

We could use some more info about the work done, when it was done, when the problems started etc. Did these problems arise right after the work was done?

 

Ok I'll start from the beginning.

Bought the truck 2 months ago. about a week after buying it it started blowing white smoke. It hard starts, has absolutely no power in between 0 to about 1500 rpm (I could floor it and it won't move), rough idle, and gets about 8 mpg.

This weekend we hooked it up to the $4000 snap on scanner we have (if I should be using a diff scanner let me know) and we got misfire on cylinder 1 and 2 and a bad cam position sensor and a bad break switch. We changed the cam position sensor and it fixed the misfire on cylinder one. We pulled cylinder two injector and found the O ring was cut. We replaced the O rings and put the injector from cylinder one in cylinder two and vice versa to see if the misfire moved over to cylinder one confirming a bad injector. The misfire was still in cylinder two. We cleared the codes and drove it down the road to see if they came back and it stalled after ten miles and was dripping oil (only happens when it stalls). Got it towed back home and called our friend that works for ford. After telling him all of this he said (once again) "pull off the oil cap and turn it over. If you get blow-by right when it misses you have a bad piston. There is and small wire on the passenger side under the hood the if you unplug and touch to the positive on the battery it will turn the engine over but not let it start." We did this and had blow by everytime exactly when it missed. And that's the whole story.

 

That might be your problem, if you had a bad oring on one injector you must replace the orings on all injectors on that side/at least/ what happens is the combustion presure will travel through the fuel rail/which is a passage through the heads, and it can blow out the orings for other cylinders. this was probably caused by the injector clamp coming loose, that is why you don't use ford's spec of 24ft-lbs, I use 25ft-lbs plus a little more to make sure they are tight, it almost impossible to narrow down exactly which cylinder has a true problem untill all the orings are replaced. It would more likely be a hurt valve than a piston by the way.

 

Thanks Bob! That's deff good to know. We only replaced the O rings on one and two. I'll be replacing all the O rings next then. It may be a few days before I can get to it but I'll post an update when I do.

 

sounds good, yeah when one lets loose it can be a pain to find out what others have been hurt, you basically have combution presure going through your fuel rail and the orings can fail at 75psi, the combustion presure is alot higher than that, even the static compression ration is over 200psi.

 

I agree with Bob, highly doubt you have a piston problem. You can get blow-by a few other ways. Start with replacing those o-rings and let us know what happens.